And the People Stay Home - a poem (and the story behind it)

Here's a story about a retired school teacher.

Catherine - she goes by Kitty - lives with five rescue dogs and her hubby, Phillip.

A former teacher and chaplain, Kitty is now retired. After years working in palliative care, Kitty was worried for her friends who still work in healthcare and battling the virus in the frontline. She felt helpless because she was no longer in service.

Her hubby, Phillip, knew just what she needed though - because Kitty had always dabbled in poetry.

He simply said: "Write. Just write again."

So Kitty sat down and wrote this...

And the people stayed home.
And read books, and listened, and rested,
and exercised, and made art, and played games,
and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated, some prayed, some danced.
Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant,
dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.

Then she shared this poem with her friends on social media, the same way she always did whenever she wrote something, and thought nothing of it.

What happened next surprised everybody...

The poem resonated with people instantly. Soon, a Facebook friend asked to share the poem with her own followers, and within three days of posting, her husband encountered the poem elsewhere on the Internet...

Then Oprah magazine asked for an interview!

Kitty was amazed, and a little embarrassed.

Insisted that she's just an everyday person trying to find grace in the free-fall, Kitty was glad that her poem could show the world that something good can come out of this collective state of "together, apart".

"We can wallow... or we can see the invitations.

Anything that you can tap into that allows your feelings to be expressed creatively will do that for you. You will feel better on the other end of it. You will be changed," she says.

Kitty encourages everyone to activate their own creative sides.

"We have gifts.

It’s a good reminder that whatever your gift is, and however small it is, keep using it. This is a really good time for that."

- Kitty O’Meara

Right now, we've just been given a huge gift: TIME.

"I would invite people to pick an art form and go for it.

People say, 'All my life, I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that.' Play with those things. Might be a dancing thing. Might be a knitting thing. Might be visual art.

Not sure where to begin?

You can make as many or as few houses - because villages come in all sizes!

"Thank you!

I am struggling to concentrate on a project that is complicated during this dreadful time, I think this might just be something I can work on bit by bit and use up some of my fabric stash!"

- Jan Mansfield

What are you working on at the moment?

Simply Email Me & Share your story with everyone :-)

Stay safe & sew ~

xoxox

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Until the restrictions tightens further, of course.

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